Saturday, March 25, 2017

The Language of the Dead

I can remember the first time I realized I spoke with an
accent, and I can remember when I realized that all of the people I knew spoke
with accents, too. It was an epiphany of sorts, an intellectual dawning that
told me the place I lived all my life wasn’t the way life was lived in other
places. There were some great insights to be had here, and one of the best was
not everyone eats grits for breakfast. I’ve always hated grits. That says a lot
about me down in this part of the world, actually.

In the last year I’ve read two books that rearranged the way
I think about how language is used and operates. The first was “ Guadalcanal:
The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle” by Richard B. Frank. This book
gave me some insight on the incredible amount of information that could be
gathered to decipher a coded message. The men and women who put the pieces
together were reinventing a hidden language and I am willing to bet that most
of them could have gone on to much more interesting studies of language had someone
offered them the opportunity. The next book was by far the one who addressed
the issue more directly and this is, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by
Yuval Noah Harari. This is the book that explained to me that each and every
human language evolved from single source. There are no languages that cannot
be traced back, and deciphered therefore, through going back and looking at
where the language is from and what it evolved from, and who once spoke it.
There are limitations on this, certainly, but if there is enough written
evidence to say a civilization existed and enough of the language written in
some form, be it clay tablets or hieroglyphics, we can tell what they were
trying to say when they wrote it.

Now let’s go back to 1980, when I discovered that not only
did I have a Southern accent, it was a very serious and strong accent, to the
point that people in LaCrosse Wisconsin had a difficult time understanding me,
even though they though the way I spoke was very charming. The differences between
Southern Georgia English the way that a very closed and immobile society spoke
the thing, versus a larger Midwestern town that was home to a University that
spoke English in a totally different manner, may seem a question of enunciation
and pronunciation, but it is a little more profound than that.

I arrived back at my hometown for Christmas and was stunned
at what I was hearing. Suddenly, everyone sounded like they had just been
teleported back from a Snuffy Smith Comic strip. From my grandmothers who I had
always revered to my friends I had grown up with, everyone spoke with an
accent. It was like seeing people naked for the first time.

Being a voracious reader from the time I was four or five
had extended my vocabulary well past the average in South Georgia, but one
thing I did not realize is how differently Southerners treated words. They
chopped them off, truncated them, made some words up entirely, and used words
in ways that the rest of the world never considered true speech. Southern euphemisms
were not something I thought remarkable until someone asked me exactly what did
“As happy as a pig in mud” meant.

What I never knew as
I was growing up is I spoke a dialect. When a closed society, and let’s face it
not too many people on earth have ever moved to South Georgia on purpose, at
least not in the sixties or seventies, there tends to be less growth in
language and more stagnation. This is actually how new languages are formed. A
portion of a culture seeks out new territory or leaves for some reason, becomes
isolated from the mother tongue for a few generations then suddenly the people
they left one hundred years ago are difficult to understand.

To give you an example when I was little boy shoes worn for
sports or for playing, not dress shoes or date shoes, where known as
“sneakers”. Let’s suppose that someone were to use that term today. If someone
walked into a store and asked for “sneakers” they may or may not have a hard
time explaining it. But suppose someone wrote that one a note, “I need to go
buy some new sneakers” then trying to decipher what this means would require a
knowledge of that word. If the note read, “The soles of my old ones are worn
out so I am going to buy some new sneakers” then there is more evidence as to
what sneakers are, but there is also some confusion. Is sole a fish? What is
meant by “old ones”? Is this a reference to people or fish or…?

In the Near East, especially in the area known as
Mesopotamia, thousands of clay tablets from many different cultures give us
quite a clear picture of who was saying what in half a dozen different
languages. We now believe we know enough about the ancient language of Sumer,
perhaps the first one every written down, to be able to use it as if we were
born to it. We know their alphabet and their letters. There are some who think
this might lead us to even speak the language again, and who knows, maybe they
are right.

In the end, I’ve kept reading. I know a lot more words than
most. I think this gives me an idea of how vast English is that gives an idea
of how vast the language of Sumer might have been. I’ve seen a few stars in a
cloudy night sky and now I imagine a universe of stars just as this Earth has
produced a galaxy of languages. We here on earth right now have an accent, the
accent of now, but we have no idea what we sounded like three hundred years ago
or three thousand years ago, or three hundred thousand years ago.

Because I don't write in dialect it's hard to tell where I'm from. Moreover, the more educated a person is the weaker the accent becomes. People don't read in dialect, they read what's there in front of them and so they don't hear it in dialect in their minds.

Being in the military will help you get rid of an accent too.

I've long thought about getting a speech therapist to get rid of it though.

Of course I don't hear dialect when I read you, and of course you do not write that way. I can be dry, sometimes what I write can be mostly for the audience of me. ;)

I can see the military helping this, as will any mixing of regional dialects for an extended time. A speech therapist shouldn't be necessary for anything but extreme cases, I would think. We should be proud of where we come from and things like this that go with it. That being said, being able to communicate readily is also very important.

I took a free online course by Yuval Noah Harari, "Sapiens." Loved it, like I love all history. As for accent, I tend to pick up local speaking patterns. Late husband and I went to Michigan (back in 70s) and though we were only there a few weeks, people here said I was already speaking like a "Yankee." Oddly enough, my husband had not a trace of southern accent, but I do. Also, my grandparents had a strange habit of changing words with an 'er' on the end. For example, my paternal grandmother's name was "Emma." Everyone called her, "Emmer." Apparently this is due to the Scotch-Irish highland's ancestors who settled in Appalachia. --Cara

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The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.